‘A whole civilization will die tonight’- Trump pledges genocide of Iranians

US President Donald Trump has called for the genocide of Iran. In his latest bizarre rant, Trump said he would wipe out the country unless it opened the straits of Hormuz ahead of a deadline he’d set for 8pm on 7 April 2026. Trump said on Truth Social:

A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS?

Adding:

We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World. 47 years of extortion, corruption, and death, will finally end. God Bless the Great People of Iran!

The stream-of-consciousness post was full of contradictions. Why, if the ‘regime’ has been successfully changed, does an entire civilisation need to “die”?

Why the threat of obliteration and then a nod to the ‘great people of Iran’?

And how does Trump mean to do it? Is it a nuclear threat? Or just his typical bully-boy bluster? Trump is hard to read, as ever. He is a declining man and the head of a declining empire, clearly. But we do know he has developed a taste for war crimes…

Trump’s taste for war crime

Trump’s second term has been full of war criminality. On the one hand he has supported the Israeli genocide in Gaza. And in his current attack on Iran he has said outright he is indifferent to war crimes.

As the Guardian reported:

Donald Trump has said that he was “not at all” concerned about committing possible war crimes as he again threatened to destroy Iran’s bridges and power plants if Tehran does not meet his Tuesday 8pm ET deadline to reopen the strait of Hormuz.

The Guardian’s senior international correspondent said:

In a rambling national address on Wednesday, the US president warned that if Iran did not reach an unspecified deal with him, US forces would “hit each and every one of their electric-generating plants” and “bring [Iran] back to the stone ages – where they belong”.

According to Politico, Trump expanded by arguing:

You know what’s a war crime? Having a nuclear weapon. Allowing a sick country, with demented leadership, [to] have a nuclear weapon — that’s a war crime.

However, the same article suggested the Pentagon were trying to find ways to frame Iranian energy and other infrastructure as dual civilian-military use to escape war crime allegations down the road:

The Pentagon is expanding a list of Iranian energy sites it can target for attacks to include ones that provide fuel and power to both civilians and the military, a likely workaround if the administration is accused of war crimes for striking basic infrastructure.

Trump’s colonial death-world

Trump’s comment reminds us again of the genocidal racism generated to sustain empire. Commenter Nesrine Malik reminded us in relation to Gaza in July 2025:

What does getting used to it [genocide] look like? It looks like accepting that there are certain groups of people who can be killed. That it is, in fact, reasonable and necessary that they should die in order to maintain a political system that is built on the inequality of human life.

This is what the philosopher Achille Mbembe calls “necropolitics” – the exercising of power to dictate how some people live and how others must die.

She goes on:

Necropolitics creates “deathworlds” where there are “new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to living conditions that confer upon them the status of the living dead”.

Adding:

In those deathworlds the killing of others, and the destruction of their habitat through epic military capabilities whose impact is never experienced by the citizens of the countries responsible, confer even more value on the humanity of those in the “civilised” west. They are exempt because they are good, not because they are strong. Palestinians die because they are bad, not because they are weak.

As in Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, Gaza (and countless other places), so it is in Iran, as far as imperialist America is concerned.

Humiliation and decline

Politico also reminded its readers that US defence secretary Pete Hegseth gutted those parts of the Pentagon which were meant to minimise civilian harm after taking office.

US-Israel attacked Iran first on 28 February without provocation. Iran was offering unprecedented concessions in negotiations at the time. The Pentagon has since stated there was no imminent threat from Iran. And the UN’s atomic watchdog, the IAEA, has said there is no evidence Iran was developing a nuclear weapon.

The US has achieved none of its original war aims. Iran predictably closed the Straits of Hormuz, a vital oil channel, once attacked – creating a global energy crisis. Far from being defeated, Iran has said the war will continue until “the enemy’s inevitable and permanent humiliation, disgrace, regret, and surrender”. Trump came to power on an anti-war ‘America First’ ticket. He now faces worldwide humiliation.

One hundred legal experts warned that US actions in Iran could be considered war crimes on 2 April. They also said they were deeply concerned that Trump administration’s rhetoric – as evidenced above – would lead to even greater horrors.

Clearly, the War on Terror has had a corrosive effect on western institutions – like the UN and ICC – built to minimise war crimes and civilian harm after WW2. We can say this while acknowledging that those ‘rules’ were never evenly applied anyway. To the narrow degree they did exist, the meagre protections they once offered are being dismantled before our very eyes.

Featured image via the Canary